I have worked from home since the first time InfoWorld fired me in 1994. When you work at home you live at work, which is precisely why telecommuting has been so embraced by non-smokestack industries that love the low office rents and longer working hours. But the tide may be turning against working at home for some larger companies. Lockheed-Martin, for example, effectively banned the practice recently, sucking nearly all the company’s telecommuters back into the office. IBM, too, is rethinking its work-at-home strategy.

Lockheed earlier this year told its managers they all had to work from plant sites, then followed that by canceling any telecommuting services paid for by the company. In theory workers can still telecommute on an occasional basis, but only on their own dime and only if they score a three or above on L-M’s five-step performance review.

As a defense contractor Lockheed-Martin may be a special case, not so much for the security reasons one might imagine in the wake of Wikileaks, but rather because defense plants tend to be owned not by the contractor but by the government. In today’s austerity it could be that Uncle Sam wants his share of the savings from all that staying home. If Lockheed wants the Feds to cover that light bill there had better be some bodies being lighted. This is pure speculation on my part, though informed by a small role I played 30 years ago in a battle between Stanford University and the Office of Naval Research over billing for indirect costs of research, which is very similar and equally byzantine.

IBM, too, is pulling back somewhat from telecommuting, though Big Blue has no government-owned facilities for those workers sucked back into the mother ship. IBM literally has more workers than desks.

At IBM’s new delivery centers like Dubuque, IA, Boulder, CO, and Columbia MO they now want all the IBMers to work in the office, in sight of management.

Teams are usually more efficient when people can work together. Part-time telecommuting often works best. Then IBM decided everyone would telecommute followed by making the teams geographically dispersed. Now people can work together for years without ever meeting in person.

IBM went too far with telecommuting. In their haste to close offices they made mistakes, distributing teams that had been more efficient working physically together. In this case efficiency often means that oxymoron bureaucrafic efficiency. When something was needed fast at IBM they used to be able to fill out the paperwork and hand carry it to the group, eventually finding someone who could handle the problem on the spot. Now all requests go into a big queue in the sky and nobody knows who will handle it, or from what country. There is no longer a way to push urgent matters through faster, no way to get them solved by the right expert, either. Worse still, requests can be rejected and deleted from the queue without notice. In a very bureaucratic company like IBM, just buying something may need 4-6 approvals with a queue for each. Telecommuting inadvertently turned the complex into the nearly impossible.

Luckily for IBM, somebody has apparently noticed this snafu. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way, though IBM has found a way to screw-up that, too. The new system features low cost delivery centers with terribly inexperienced teams of workers. IBM can’t seem to hold onto what is good. They throw out both the good and the bad for the sake of change.

Which brings us back to Lockheed-Martin and that performance evaluation of three or better needed to qualify for telecommuting. Suddenly there are a lot of Lockheed managers getting ratings in the two range for the first time in their careers. This is a subliminal effect since employees often don’t share their ratings with co-workers, but it is definitely happening. What’s interesting (and sad) about this is what it means for any future Lockheed layoffs. Next time the lower third is cut off, at least some wouldn’t be in that third had it not been for this telecommuting decision.

Management is cocking the pistol for workers they don’t like then allowing the next layoff to pull the trigger.

50 Comments

Dave
December 29, 2010 at 7:09 am

I’ve seen lots of corporate telecommuters laid off over the last few years. If you’re a corporate worker, and not a freelancer or independent consultant, your telecommuting lifestyle might be akin to a bullet in the head.

The #1 way to keep your job – this includes avoiding the outsourced tech worker “My Job Went To India” effect – is to make yourself indispensable.

And the bottom line, like it or not, is that when you’re present – working in the presence of your co-workers – you’re a lot less likely to be considered on the periphery.

Hard to go over & bang away on a co-worker’s keyboard to fix a weird problem or to draw a useful diagram on a whiteboard in front of a group when you’re sitting in the kitchen in front of your laptop.

Sure, you can do a “Live Meeting” or remote control someone’s desktop, but let’s face it, it’s not the same thing. Not at all.

Jeff Power
December 29, 2010 at 7:59 am

+++

Hank
December 30, 2010 at 7:31 am

As the old saying goes, If you can’t be fired, you can’t be promoted either.

Cris E
December 30, 2010 at 2:58 pm

And if you’ve already done the heavy lifting of making your job portable, it makes it that much easier for the company to send it abroad.

John
January 6, 2011 at 8:49 pm

It depends a lot on the job being done. If you have to go out and meet lots of customers it may not matter much where you have your desk.

Joe
December 29, 2010 at 8:05 am

I think there can and should be a happy medium. I know telecommuters who have not been ‘on site’ for years and make it work because they are good communicators. Likewise I have seen productivity drop off the charts for some of them.

It is all a matter of balance and managers having the ability to see if working from home is really ‘working’ or not. If you have a good team and good communication, go for it. If not, keep the office open.

BozoTheClown
December 29, 2010 at 8:10 am

I smile at this column … (I go fishing 6.5 days a week on average).

When a “well known company” accelerated its head count in India from 3,500 to 77,000 in 3-1/2 years, you might believe there was need for a strategy to “justify” the dumping of seasoned, but “expensive” States-side “talent.”

As for urgent **BIG** Customer problems getting lost in the “telecommute cloud,” no no no. There is a NY-based “account executive” (or two or three) assigned exclusively as “minders” to harass the needed problem analysts and solvers out of bed if that’s what is needed.

The part you missed is: a 1-performer (top rating) is easily let go because _recent_ “accomplishes” are so-yesterday, but getting the correct age-sex-race profile of these selected for unemployment is a very important consideration, as any major company with a HUGE legal team knows.

BTW, the early early warning came the day a “colleague” in India said that the telephone on his desk rang to two different numbers. One listed in India and one listed in a U.S. area code.

India is 6-1/2 hours ahead… Surely having your phone ring on a U.S. number doesn’t make sense, unless YOUR BED is also next to your “office” computer terminal…or so a naturalized friend born in India suggested to me. :^)

I’m an IBMer in the UK, and this is something I’ve noticed as well – an increasing trend for people to start coming back into the workplace rather than working at home. What is interesting to me is IBM’s policy of selling off its premises, and then leasing them back again – it may have worked well during the heydays of telecommuting, but I wonder what will happen when the company runs out of desk space and then gets charged huge rents to get the buildings back…!

TemporalBeing
December 29, 2010 at 10:31 am

Well there’s likely a lot more going on that we can realize.

Lockheed, for instance, probably rents a lot of their facilities if only so they can charge it off to customers (e.g. government). Northrop Grumman does the same thing – in fact, when they both TRW, TRW had owned a number of their facilities; Northrop Grumman sold them off (including one site to IBM) and started renting everything, charging it all to the government contracts. Does the government own those facilities? No; but the government certainly does pay for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lockheed was doing the same thing.

IBM does own a lot of facilities – though they rent a lot out to others as well.

Well, back to the topic of telecommuting – from the comments/article IBM certainly moved too far into telecommuting without planning for it first. Instead of necessarily swinging back in the opposite direction it would make more sense to correct the bureaucratic/services processes to fix the problem than to deny telecommuting like Lockheed is going. But when did big business start doing things that actually made sense? So yeah, they’ll likely screw it up again in the interest of keeping a lot of middle-management employed that ought not be otherwise.

Of course, it could also be that a prick of a manager got high enough in each organization to say “no telecommuting” (had one of those too).

So there’s likely a lot more going on – what, we may never know.

NoTalentHack
December 29, 2010 at 10:57 am

About 5 years ago, I was employed by a large government contractor (not Lockheed, but one that often works with them). Ours was not a defense contract, it was with another agency; the information we worked with was pretty much public domain, so security, while not ignored, was not a big issue.

That said, telecommuting was rarely permitted. I think the reasons were
1) The company was extremely meticulous about timekeeping rules. The last thing they wanted to do was to be involved in any controversy when billing the federal government. “That day I wasn’t in the office, I worked at home for 8 hours” just wouldn’t have cut it.

2) There was no networking infrastructure to enable you to remotely use the corporate (let alone government) servers and workstations. For one, the company was so big that getting the required changes to the network (firewall holes, access rights, etc.) would have been a challenging trip through bureaucracy. But more importantly, the cost would have had to have been charged back to the government (who more than likely would not have approved it).

My surmise that Lockheed (particularly if the edict went out only to managers) is that they want them on premises to be managing the underlings. For all the efficiency reasons already mentioned. Also maybe to simplify all the headaches involved in granting access.

Charlie
December 29, 2010 at 9:09 pm

My former company sounds a lot like yours. Of course, they had no problem with outsourcing 1/2 of a huge project to India. The funny thing was, I was allowed to work from home on the weekends when I wasn’t officially “on the clock”.

Ronc
December 30, 2010 at 2:46 pm

40 years ago, in engineering at least, working off the clock as well as not working on the clock was quite normal. Usually done on premises for convenience. India wasn’t even heard of.

Sokatula
December 29, 2010 at 11:08 am

It’s just another excuse to lay off Western Employees, IMHO.
Close the office, make people work from home.
Tell people that they have to come back into the office.
Sorry, there is no office near you now – we closed it.
You can move to Dubuq, or India – No? sorry, don’t let the door hit
you on the way out.

They are also (in Services) concerned because the tech staff may be
resting during the day , instead of working. We have to work night AND days, don’t you know!?

Bromodrosis
January 2, 2011 at 8:24 am

That’s exactly what IBM has done. Those “Data Centers” in the middle of nowhere (Dubuque, et al) were picked specifically because they were close to colleges ain low income areas. The idea was that they can cherry pick talent, pay them dirt wages and train them up. Good luck to them, it isn’t working in India/China/Hungary/VietNam…

MJB
January 13, 2011 at 2:26 pm

The problem is that the cherry picked talent take the training and leave for better salaries. IBM doesn’t have a retainment rate for these people.

Pete
April 21, 2012 at 1:21 am

That’s OK, IBM doesn’t train people any more.

bfticardi
December 29, 2010 at 1:29 pm

I worked a telecommuting gig for a year for a financial services group at a major bank. They needed to document their services, processes and procedures for doing business. Well I mostly slept late and did about an hour of work a day because most of my contacts for information in the company were either “out at meetings”, traveling or “unavailable”. Basically it was a big joke for which I got a modest salary for a year as a contractor and accomplished very little.

I learned that telecommuting is a bad idea in the long run due to the old adage that if you can’t see the person he doesn’t exist to you. Most calls wouldn’t get returned and most people wouldn’t respond to email requests since they simply didn’t know you and your problem was not high on their list to solve. Nothing substitutes for being in a person’s “face” to get a response out of them. If I can’t visit them in their office then my requests usually won’t be as high a priority to them as the issues of someone they work near. An email is less important than a voice on a phone, which is less important than a personal visit.

Since then I have chosen not to do telecommuting jobs.

Charlie
December 29, 2010 at 9:13 pm

Some how the military makes telecommuting work.

Submarines sometimes don’t even surface for 6 months at a time.

The managers that don’t like to see empty chairs are really just worried about their own jobs. Sorta of like on Office Space where they keep asking the guy – “so what would you say you *do* around here”.

Chad
January 4, 2011 at 10:29 pm

Of course, most of the work product of a submarine isn’t Some Thing. It’s being Some Place.

Samurai
December 29, 2010 at 2:18 pm

After spending a year in the office at a tech firm I switched to working 3 days at home. Within 2 months I was laid off. I wasn’t sleeping in or slacking off, in fact I felt that I was more responsive and productive because I was conscience of the appearance that working from home often gives. I agree that out of sight is, out of mind. Its easy for mangers to axe the telecomuters when they have to trim the corporate fat because theres almost this notion that telecommuters are part-timers and therefor dispensible. And trimming the fat is always inevitable.

Montgomery
December 29, 2010 at 5:51 pm

Sokatula touched on a big point related to telecommuting not touched on in this article. I’m a work as a senior finance manager for one of the world’s largest banks. In order to reduce costs, we’ve become heavily involved in sending jobs overseas. However, that has a lot of down sides: language barrier, crappy service levels, shortage of qualified labor, etc. Most of all, it’s a PR problem because it puts Americans out of jobs.

So work at home has become an increasingly attractive alternative. The cost savings are similar to sending jobs overseas (not quite as good, but close enough). If telecommuting isn’t working out for some companies, they aren’t going to go back to paying more for labor (unless there is an overriding concern like billing of government contracts), so they’ll find a way to send those jobs overseas.

Readykilowatt
December 29, 2010 at 5:51 pm

unemployment is at 9% or more, depending on who’s numbers you use. Companies can push people around, telecommuters cost money on budget lines that are easy to cut, and lots of managers don’t like not seeing employees sitting in chairs.

Jerry
December 29, 2010 at 10:36 pm

I think this is mostly big bureaucracies flexing their muscles in time with some current corporate trend. Why? Probably because right now they can. I work for a large corporation in the IT industry and the number money-wasting actions I see on a weekly basis is ridiculous. Doubly so when there are official programs and policies to “save money” and “streamline operations”.

Given the political environment here in the west (perhaps elsewhere too), it is highly doubtful if the corporate foolishness, along with that of our governments, is going to end any time soon. It would probably take a national meltdown, the likes of which we have never seen, to effect such change. I doubt anyone would wish that to happen, but I wish the foolishness could taper off without crisis.

The problem is that most Americans have been convinced that the Republican agenda had nothing to do with the current state of affairs. There were 28 years from Reagan through BushII. For 22 of those years the Republicans controlled at least 3 of the 4 branches of the Government. Yet Americans are willingly brainwashed into believing that the current situation is a product of Liberals. Ha. The only time during those 28 years that the country went sort of well, were Clinton’s; Monica and all. I swear Americans are as stupid today as they were in the 19th century. And there’s a new endtimes cult to boot.

l.a.guy
December 30, 2010 at 12:12 am

I don’t know if this was coincidence, but apparently Obama recently signed the “Teleworker Act” into law to protect the rights of teleworkers.

Lockheed Martin sucks. They don’t treat you as a professional, don’t trust that you’re going to do your job at home. That’s why I left. My new company, also a government contractor, is actually increasing our telecommuting footprint. They also treat their staff as professionals. Funny how people respond positively to that.

Jeff
December 30, 2010 at 7:36 am

The real question is, when working from home do you owe your employer a full 8 hours of productive work, or just the 2 hours they’d get if you were actually in the office?

What, those 6 hours of networking don’t count as productive??? How else can one get promoted??

francis
December 30, 2010 at 10:19 am

I find I am 2x – 3x more productive working at home – less interruptions. It only works because the kids are in school and my wife is at work, so the house is dead quiet for most of the day. That, plus 2.5 hours of in-traffic commuting saved.

But no, I don’t work from home every day. I only do it one or two days a week. That seems to be the ideal ratio for me.

Not everyone can work from home. You have to be self disciplined and focused or you will just waste the time.

Frank P.
December 30, 2010 at 8:25 pm

In my experience, certain large defense contractors are notoriously unethical when dealing with employee performance reviews. To be sure, they would never overcharge the government customer, but they’ll deliberately alter a performance review to suit management desires. At my ex-defense contractor, the review process was completely transparent through the first stages, then the reviews disappeared into a black ops management process. The end result of the management process was that reviews came back with the final rating and the middle managers were told to find a way to explain it. In this case they want to get rid of telecommuting, so the rate people as “low performers” (2) instead of “performing to expectations” (3).

Fortunately my new defense contractor has all the infrastructure in place to work at home where possible.

My take is that the pull back from work at home is a regrouping action after industry found out what works and what doesn’t.

One thing that doesn’t work is the fact that highly “wired” up employees are too easily access smartphone, IM, high speed comms of things which compete with their worktime. It once was good to have everyone login to the data centre to upload all their stuff, it was the only place “reachable” to your employees off their modem link. Now you give a company laptop which goes to the ISP which has to limit Facebook, certain types of websites, IM chats not related to business and on and on then multiply that for each mobile employee.

This is a huge liability for the company and certain cases are popping up that are going to push workers back to the box. I think the ZeuS hackers are the crecendo of why certain companies and banks will think twice of telecommuting.

JS
December 31, 2010 at 10:33 pm

Another reason why certain jobs are going back into the box.

“Between 2009 and early 2010, Lockheed Martin found that “six to eight companies” among its subcontractors “had been totally compromised—e-mails, their networks, everything,” according to Chief Information Security Officer Anne Mullins. ”

The LM security guys pretty much see boogymen in every shadow (including their own…). They were also looking for excuses to take machine rights away from employees wherever and whenever possible. It’s a huge, draconian, bureaucracy. They don’t do stuff based on good reason & data. They just do it because a VP read somewhere that there might be holes.

I guess you don’t spend much time in the database trench warfare. The NoSql/xml/VSAM/java crowd is happily turning the clock back to 1965. With all the bloated code that goes with it. I suppose if writing lots of data munging code is a good thing, you might like this reactionary turn of events. But it’s not progress.

[…] working for, can be done from my home office, but American business is still largely attached to having its workers lined up in little cubes. And greater Cleveland’s American-typical sprawly urban development makes public […]

LM Guy
January 4, 2011 at 5:44 am

Well, this is right and wrong… LM yanked the rug out from under us telecommuters, but I don’t think their intent was to cancel telecommuting for many of us. Their goal was to shove the cost of telecommuting onto the employees, so they could reap (another) huge cost-savings windfall.

Problem is, a bunch of us said ‘ugg…can’t afford the phone line, guess I’ll bite the bullet and go back to the office’. So many, that the VP sent out a panicked “we don’t want you all to come back…really!” email. Or maybe that was just more smoke and mirrors.

I would say I’m more productive at the office than I was at home. However, I’ve found that casual telecommuting is a real boon to both employer and employee. When the kids have been sick, I’ve still been able to remote into my work machine, do a full days work, and go back in the next day. I work as hard or harder those days, because I don’t want them to say ‘don’t do that’, which would simply punish everyone.

J
January 5, 2011 at 9:29 pm

I’m a LM telecommuter for 4 years now and a senior manager. I get all the leadership announcements and never heard of this policy. Nor does LM use a numeric rating system for performance evaluations. You may have heard some snippet of info from an employee from some segment of LM, but you better do some real research on this one if you want to talk about LM as a whole.

I’m a LM telecommuter for 4 years now and a senior manager. I get all the leadership announcements and never heard of this policy. Nor does LM use a numeric rating system for performance evaluations. You may have heard some snippet of info from an employee from some segment of LM, but you better do some real research on this one if you want to talk about LM as a whole

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